Conflict

Conflict is the convention that makes a story move: somebody wants something and something is in the way. The mistake is to treat it as a synonym for fighting. A fistfight is the smallest conflict a film can stage and usually the least interesting. The question is not who is fighting but what the fight is a proxy for, and whether the film knows. The books offer three sizes of answer, from plot mechanism to a theory of what a film is about.

Mechanism, psychology, structure

Film Art keeps it small and mechanical. A classical protagonist has a goal; without a "blocking element" nothing would stop them reaching it in the first reel; so the plot supplies an opposing character with opposing traits (fa 99). Conflict here is a component of causality, no more.

Boggs (The Art of Watching Films) calls conflict "the mainspring of practically any film" and sorts it into external and internal (awf 49). External conflict is a contest of wills, or a character against nature, fate or the system; internal conflict is a division inside one person. His caveat is that the two rarely separate: a duel grows into a struggle between the value systems the duellists stand for.

Media & Society makes that caveat the whole theory. Following Kitses on the western, it reads conflict as a table of binary oppositions in which characters, settings and even colours line up on two sides, and the sides "cohere to provide a central opposition between two different value systems" (mas 253). Resolution is a synthesis: protagonist and antagonist take on aspects of each other so the opposition can close. The difference from Film Art is one of scale. Bordwell describes what conflict does to a plot. Media & Society describes what a plot's conflict reveals about the culture that made it.

On the bench

Marion Crane resolves her external conflict before the film kills her. The theft and the flight end the night she works out how to repay the money (Killing the protagonist at minute 47); what remains is internal, and Psycho removes the person carrying it. That is why the murder feels structurally wrong as well as violent.

Travis Bickle is conflict without a worthy opponent. The film builds a man who needs an enemy and gives him a woman who will not take his calls (Taxi Driver — the phone call), a candidate he cannot reach and three men in a stairwell (Taxi Driver — the shoot-out). None is the opposition his rage is sized for, and the film's authors could not agree on what the final fight meant (Schrader and Scorsese disagree about the ending).

The Craft is the binary case. Every conflict after The Craft — light as a feather is a fight over what that scene proved, and the sides sort by what the girls asked for: three wanted something about themselves changed, Nancy wanted out of a trailer (Nancy is the only poor one). The ending's synthesis keeps power with the girl born to it and punishes the one whose motive was material (The Craft turns on its own coven). Lay the oppositions out in a table and the film's values show.

What to look for

• Name the goal and the blocking element. Is the block a person, a system, or something inside the character?
• If the external conflict were resolved tomorrow, what would still be wrong? That remainder is the internal conflict.
• List what lines up on each side of the central opposition. Which side does the ending reward?
• Does the antagonist deserve the protagonist's effort? If not, why has the film mismatched them?

In the books

But in the classical narrative there's a blocking element: an opposition that creates conflict. Typically, the protagonist comes up against a character with opposing traits and goals.

— Film Art, fa 99

Conflicts can seldom be isolated completely from other individuals, society as a whole, or the value systems of the individuals involved.

— Boggs, awf 49

These then cohere to provide a central opposition between two different value systems. Analysis of this opposition leads us to a deeper understanding of what the film is essentially concerned with.

— Media & Society, mas 253